The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is one of the more improbable success stories of the 21st-century Church. Founded in 1099 to provide hospital care and military defence in the Holy Land, it has retained much of its medieval tradition and ceremony. But it has also, by gradual reform, become a powerhouse of international aid. More than 100,000 members, medical staff and volunteers are offering practically every form of charitable assistance around the world, from handing out sandwiches to the homeless in Britain, to running Aids clinics in Africa, to rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean.
The order attributes this vast network in large part to its sovereign status. Thanks to its diplomatic links with more than 100 countries, it often has access to places that other agencies cannot reach.
It is a religious order, some of whose knights take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. But the order also values its independent sovereignty, which it has jealously guarded. In the early 1950s, when Cardinal Nicola Canali tried to bring the order more under the sway of the Vatican, the knights successfully resisted what they saw as a power grab. Since then Rome has mostly let the order get on with things – right up until last month.
The crisis was brought about by the dismissal of Albrecht von Boeselager, the order's Grand Chancellor (number three). Boeselager's previous job was running the order's humanitarian arm, Malteser International. A few Malteser projects had been handing out condoms – since 2005, according to the watchdog the Lepanto Institute. The order says that Boeselager had known about this since at least 2013 and had failed to respond properly. Moreover, it alleges, he had concealed the problem from his superiors. Boeselager denies this, saying he acted as soon as he knew about it.
This would have remained an internal matter, except that Pope Francis himself became involved. On November 10, he had a meeting with the order's patron, Cardinal Raymond Burke, who serves as an intermediary between the Vatican and the order. At the beginning of December, according to sources within the order, the Pope wrote Cardinal Burke a letter asking the order to take action against any possible cause of moral scandal. The exact content of the letter is unknown; but it was universally taken as a reference to the Boeselager situation.
I'm told that the mood at the Order of Malta's headquarters was largely one of relief. The issue of Boeselager's alleged wrongdoing had dragged on for some time without resolution. The German aristocrat has been as much part of the Order of Malta community as anyone. His late father Philipp, who took part in the July Plot which narrowly failed to assassinate Hitler, is one of the order's most celebrated members. And Albrecht, like his father, has given his life to the order. This was a delicate situation for an organisation that often works more like a family than a bureaucracy.
But now that the Pope was expressing his alarm, it seemed impossible to put off decisive action. On December 6 the Grand Master, Fra' Matthew Festing, called in Boeselager for a meeting. Fra' Festing, a former art expert for Sotheby's, is not the most obviously fierce disciplinarian. In person, he seems more like a jovial uncle than a reigning prince in charge of a chivalric order of knights. But now, sources in the order suggest, the obvious response was to ask for Boeselager's resignation.
Fra' Festing invited Boeselager to resign; Boeselager refused. Festing commanded him, under his promise of obedience, to resign; remarkably, Boeselager refused again. He was removed from his position, and the order began to look for a new Grand Chancellor.
A few days later, they received some unexpected news. Boeselager had appealed to his allies, who in turn had appealed to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican's Secretary of State. Cardinal Parolin wrote to Fra' Festing telling him the order had misunderstood the Pope's thinking. "His Holiness asked that dialogue be the approach used to address and resolve potential problems," Cardinal Parolin wrote, according to a leaked letter. "He never mentioned, conversely, expelling anyone." Cardinal Parolin did not stop there: at a meeting with Fra' Festing soon afterwards, he told him that he would launch an inquiry.
In a public statement, the order expressed surprise. Boeselager's dismissal was, it said, an "act of internal governmental administration of the Sovereign Order of Malta and consequently falls solely within its competence". A Vatican inquiry would be "unacceptable".
Canonists agreed: it is – as Ed Condon writes below – very difficult to see what authority the Vatican has to investigate another sovereign entity. The Pope does have authority over the order, but its exercise requires a very specific – and quite dramatic – legal action. Unless that happens, no Vatican official has any more authority to act on the matter than does, say, the British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.
Fra' Festing has asked members of the order not to help the Vatican's inquiry. He has said publicly that the order is loyal to the Pope. But that doesn't mean members must do the bidding of any official in the Vatican.
How to make sense of this strange clash between two tiny sovereign bodies? There are two possible explanations: dirty tricks or a misunderstanding.
Supporters of the first theory point to the tension (to put it mildly) between Pope Francis and Cardinal Burke. The cardinal is one of the four who, with their dubia, have asked Francis to answer five yes-or-no questions about whether Amoris Laetitia is compatible with previous Church teaching. Cardinal Burke has also said that the quartet may issue a (possibly private) correction of the Pope, maybe in the next few months. For some observers, the whole thing cannot be a coincidence.
It would not be the first time that the Pope has intervened against someone perceived as unsympathetic. After Cardinal Robert Sarah, the Vatican's liturgy chief, invited priests to celebrate Mass facing east, he was publicly rebuked and his department was overhauled. The John Paul II Institute, seen as too conservative, had its leadership replaced.
Michael Brendan Dougherty, senior correspondent of the American magazine The Week, reports that the Pope is also looking into removing child abuse cases from the oversight of the CDF – and allegedly moving them to friends of his who are more lenient in how they deal with some abusers.
And yet, much of this is still at the level of speculation – as are the theories about Francis and Cardinal Burke. It's arguable that the whole dispute results from a series of misunderstandings. First, the Pope did not make quite clear what he wanted from the order. Then Fra' Festing felt he had no choice but to sack Boeselager. Boeselager turned to Cardinal Parolin, who mistakenly thought this was the Vatican's business.
The commission will be led by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, a Vatican diplomat who has recently dismissed claims that the Secretariat of State is overstepping its legitimate authority. Also on the commission are a canon lawyer and three members of the order. The word in Rome is that the commission is "stacked" with Boeselager supporters. Of the order's 40 national associations, I understand that only four have come out strongly in support of Boeselager: but one is the influential German association, headed by Boeselager's ally Erich Prinz von Lobkowicz, who has close Vatican links.
While the Sovereign Military Order of Malta may no longer be military or govern the island of Malta, it remains a truly sovereign entity and is recognised as such in international law. The order issues its own passports and stamps, and has full diplomatic relations with more than 100 countries – including the Holy See. Like the Holy See, the order has permanent observer status at the United Nations. As most people know, its roots go back to the Crusader era when it was known as the Order of Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, later becoming the governing body of the islands of Rhodes and Malta, the latter until the Napoleonic Wars.
The order may be a Catholic religious order, but unlike any other order, it does not report to the Holy See's Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life – or to any other Vatican department, for that matter. The constitution of the order, its own sovereign law, makes clear that "The religious nature of the order does not prejudice the exercise of sovereign prerogatives pertaining to the order in so far as it is recognised by states as a subject of international law." While its members make vows or promises of obedience (depending on the class of knight they are) their religious obedience remains strictly within the order itself. Indeed, its constitution specifically states, in the section on relations with the Holy See, that "Religious members through their vows, as well as members of the Second Class through the Promise of Obedience, are only subject to their appropriate Superiors in the Order." Even the Grand Master of the order is elected without papal approval or ratification.
It can seem jarring to most people that there is a large, internationally prominent, explicitly Catholic body which does not answer to the Vatican, but that is exactly what the Order of Malta is. The closest thing there is to curial oversight of the order is the office of Cardinal Patron, currently Cardinal Burke, who is appointed by the Pope to "promote the spiritual interests of the order and relations between the Holy See and the order". The role is, legally speaking, chaplain and papal ambassador to the knights; he has no executive or deliberative function within the order, or any governing power to exercise.
The sovereignty of the order was originally granted by the pope, and the order's constitution retains a legal mechanism for the pope to abrogate it. This is not, however, something that can be done informally, haphazardly or on a whim; the rights of the order which a pope intends to revoke have to be "expressly abrogated", meaning a formal legislative act on the part of the Holy Father. As a matter purely between the order and the Holy See, this would be of enormous significance, but taken in the context of international law and diplomacy the scope of the impact would be hard to predict.
While the order originally received its sovereign status through an act of the pope, it has since independently forged full diplomatic ties with many other countries which recognise the order as a sovereign subject of international law, including the UN. For the Holy See to effectively revoke its independence, over, say, a matter of internal governance, would be a serious diplomatic event akin to Britain involving itself in the governmental affairs of a former colony.
Given that the Holy See and the order are, at least in international law, very similar, any act by the Vatican which undercuts the sovereign status of the order could easily be turned back against the Holy See by its own international critics. A diplomatic row between the two could well spiral into a serious threat to the international legitimacy of both institutions.